User blog:Yeonchi/Revelations and current progress
A couple of weeks ago, I finished transcribing and writing the plots for all episodes of Sea Princesses up to Season 2 Episode 16 (The Mural). We are still waiting for the Mr Bean and Friends channel to continue posting, but if last year’s patterns are any indication, our wait will hopefully be over. I started writing the transcripts from the end of January to the start of March and honestly, it’s amazing how much progress I made in that time. On average, transcribing an 11-minute-or-so episode takes me around an hour. I usually transcribed about two episodes a day, but sometimes I would do more so that I could either take a break for a day or even reduce the work I had to do. Once I’ve done the transcript, I can basically write the plot from it because I’ve already watched the episode and gotten an idea for how the plot progressed. To be honest, if I had downloaded the episodes from ABC iView in 2016, then the transcription would have been a bit easier for me because I would have the closed captions, but this is where we are now. I said before that I was willing to have volunteers to help write the transcripts and plots, but in the end, I ended up doing them all myself. Oh well, if you have to get something done, you have to do it yourself, I suppose. In 2017, after uploads of Sea Princesses were taken down on YouTube and the mystery 4chan fansubber was nowhere to be seen, I considered starting a sub group to translate the Spanish raws into English, but I was too busy to go through with the idea and even if I did, I don’t think a lot of people would have taken notice. Now with the English dub being reuploaded, subtitling the episodes into English is now redundant. I’ve put the transcripts into my cloud drive folder as a zip file, so if you want to translate it into your language, then feel free to do so. As far as “complete raws” go, there are really only two versions that will be fully available; the Spanish Disney Channel raws and the English dub raws (when it is complete). There are DVDs available for the Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish versions, but I can barely find anything for the latter and there are only five volumes for the former, covering a total of 30 episodes in the first series. Even when Discovery Kids Brazil broadcast the second season, it was a dub of the English version. On top of all this, the episodes are only available in 4:3 and not 16:9. In summary, the English dub is pretty much the original version and the Spanish raws are there as a supplement (particularly given that some of the episodes were taken down from the channel I downloaded them from). Since I had to watch every episode in order to write the plots and transcripts, I decided to review them as well while I was at it. Of course, it’s not finished yet, but I have completed reviews for all the English episodes available to now along with my general thoughts on the series. You can find it in the cloud drive folder, but do note that the reviews are written from a mature point of view. I'll be doing a final version of the review when all episodes have been uploaded. When I wrote my comeback post in June last year, I lauded the channel’s uploading of episodes as a miracle, particularly given that other uploads had been taken down the year before and there were barely any episodes available in the first place. Unfortunately, I have some bad news; this “miracle” isn’t actually what you think it is. The reason I say this is because recently, I discovered (through some random Google searching) that the Mr Bean and Friends channel belongs to – and get this – Endemol Shine Group. That’s right, the same people who Z U C C E D the mystery 4chan subber and some of the Spanish raws decided to come back and upload the episodes themselves. According to this article, they have partnered up with XUMO (an OTT platform in the US) to launch the Mr Bean and Friends and Puddle Jumper channels. This means that episodes of Sea Princesses are being posted in an official manner, even if it is under a different name. To be honest, we really should have seen this revelation coming. Why did the channel upload episodes of Mr Bean and Tracey McBean (among others) alongside Sea Princesses? There is only one logical explanation, which is that the rights to those series are owned by Endemol Shine Group. Looking at the other channel, Puddle Jumper, there are more cartoons featured on it, including Bananas in Pyjamas, Gordon the Garden Gnome and Classic Tales among others. On a side note, they also have a channel named Totes Amaze, which features series like Blue Water High, The Sleepover Club and A gURLs wURLd, also among others. If you’re a 90’s or early 00’s Australian, then you would probably recognise some of those TV shows from your childhood. The main thing is that all these shows are licenced from Endemol Shine Group, including Sea Princesses, so this isn’t really a miracle performed by Kuroto Dan, but a calculated strategy. It might have been cruel at the start, but it came out alright in the end. This also explains why the series hasn’t been Z U C C E D on YouTube again. The past few years have seen a surge in the uploading of children’s TV shows (and other content targeted at children) on YouTube when ten years ago, barely anything was available in that regard. At the same time, however, children are being exposed to disturbing and predatory content while the creators of that content are circumventing YouTube’s enforcement of their Community Guidelines and exploiting YouTube’s monetisation programs for the sake of entertainment or financial gain. Naturally, some parents have decided to not let their kids go on YouTube, which is why the cloud drive folder is available as an alternative means for concerned viewers to view or download episodes of Sea Princesses. When I told admin Liggliluff last year about the episodes being reuploaded, he asked me if the episodes were the raw files since YouTube compresses videos and the channel uploaded them with the Mr Bean endcard instead of the opening and closing credits. I told him that it was the closest thing I could find because I didn’t want to bother joining Amazon Prime just to screencap or download the episodes; I wanted to let the channel upload them instead. Recently, however, I found some download links to the raw files from Amazon; the only problem was that the only working links available weren’t for a batch zip/rar file containing all the episodes, but the separate episodes themselves. Also, you know those download sites; they only allow you to download one file at a time and it can take half an hour for me to even download it, not to mention the time I have to wait until I can download another file. I did try downloading a couple of the raw episodes, however, but while the files were decently small, the quality wasn’t any better than what is available on YouTube. Based on the time it took me to download them, you might as well just download the episodes from YouTube and get it over with in less time. Since I now know that the channel is the official way to watch the episodes for free, I don’t want to tell you where I got the raw files on here, but if you have the money for a premium account or the patience to wait and download all the episodes, then I’ll have the details in a file I put into the cloud drive folder. Recently, I took a closer look into the Princesas do Mar books and after reading the synopses, it made me want to translate them even more because they are very different to the cartoon series by a long shot. The books aren't available in Australia and I'm not in a position where I can buy them online easily, so I'm relying on the fans to send scans, snapshots and/or typed transcripts so I can translate them in my free time. If you can provide them (or anything else I've mentioned), then feel free to contact me on Facebook. I know I debunked a miracle earlier in this blog post, but with all the things I have planned for this wiki, it's going to take a miracle for any significant progress to be made. All I can do now is wait for a miracle to happen. Category:Blog posts